With the portfolio ownership of its budget comes the delegated authority (and accountability and responsibility) to approve and manage the draw down (within the agreed financial guardrails).
This means portfolios must put in place (and be able to demonstrate) suitable rigour, process and controls for approving this spend (an internal investment board), involving the entire Portfolio Leadership Team, key stakeholders, and with alignment to overarching technical, cyber, data or digital strategies, whilst ensuring they are made in a timely and effective way.
The delegation of this decision making down to portfolios, means that alignment to technical, cyber, data or digital strategies can no longer be managed centrally, but must instead be frameworked in such a way that that they can be done within each portfolio. Transparency enables the central assurance that these controls are being correctly and suitably implemented, and an issues dealt with by exception.
These approvals should cover innovation, change and run, and operate within any agreed guardrails, allowing external approvals by exception only. For change, these are expected to be done through commitment cases. For innovation, these are likely to be much smaller and require more regular iterative and incremental decisions on whether to persevere, terminate or pivot innovation efforts based on learnings to date.